MIT Press’s Direct to Open: Exploratory Phase No More

Sponsored by MIT Press

Recorded on 03/03/2021
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 182

Monographs are an integral part of the Humanities, an area of academia known for its slower shift into the open access world. While journals and ebooks have adjusted to OA models with relative ease, publishers have struggled to do the same with monographs. What can be done?

In October 2019, MIT Press received a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund to publish a collection of monographs open access and to develop a sustainable publishing framework that other presses can use. Over a year later, with a pandemic in between, MIT Press is ready to unroll its library collective action model, Direct to Open (D2O). 

In the first episode of our four-part series, Emily Farrell, Library Partnerships and Sales Lead at MIT Press, offers a refresher on the goals of D20 and an update on the development process in the past year. Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, joins the conversation to offer his perspective on CRL’s and other consortia’s role in bridging the divide between libraries and publishers.

About the guests:

Gregory T. Eow
President
Center for Research Libraries

Greg Eow is President of the Center for Research Libraries, responsible for setting strategic directions and overall CRL programming and services in collaboration with the CRL Board of Directors, CRL staff, CRL member libraries, and CRL strategic partners. Before joining the Center for Research Libraries in 2019, he served as the Associate Director for Collections at the MIT Libraries, where he led an administrative portfolio that included scholarly communications and collections strategy, digital preservation, acquisitions and metadata creation, and the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Eow has held previous appointments as Charles Warren Bibliographer at the Harvard Library and as Kaplanoff Librarian for American History at the Yale University Library. Eow currently serves on the Management Board of the MIT Press as well as the Board of Directors of the Chicago Collections Consortium. He is a member of the American Historical Association.

Emily Farrell
Library Partnerships and Sales Lead
MIT Press

Emily Farrell is Library Partnerships & Sales Lead at the MIT Press where she works with libraries on ensuring access to digital content. Before the MIT Press, she worked in both sales and as an acquisitions editor for linguistics, developing a program in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, at De Gruyter. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from Macquarie University, Sydney. Emily serves on the board of the non-profit legal services organization UnLocal, as well as the Foundation for the Yonkers Public Library.

Enjoy the episode? Check out the rest of the series:

Listen to our previous conversation with MIT Press, Finding a Place for Open Access Monographs:

Missed an episode? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Choice Podcast Updates!

Related Posts